Veeva: A Public Benefit Corporation

“We believe social and economic benefits go hand in hand and have always operated with the long-term view that doing the right thing for our customers, employees, and communities ultimately allows us to deliver the best results for investors.”

Peter Gassner, Founder and CEO, Veeva Systems
2024 Veeva Public Benefit Corporation Report

Operating as a Public Benefit Corporation

As a Public Benefit Corporation, we are guided by our core values — do the right thing, customer success, employee success, and speed — to help the life sciences industry improve health and extend life and to create high-quality jobs that benefit our employees and communities.

Our PBC Commitment

As a PBC, we operate as a for-profit company, but we also pursue a public benefit purpose that is listed in our certificate of incorporation, can only be changed by shareholder vote, and is intended to provide societal benefits beyond just shareholder financial returns. Our public benefit purpose is as follows:

To provide products and services that are intended to help make the industries we serve more productive and to create high-quality employment opportunities in the communities in which we operate.

Equally important, as a PBC, our directors have a legal responsibility to balance the interests of shareholders with the interests of customers, employees, and other key stakeholders.

Why a PBC?

Operating as a PBC aligns with our longstanding Vision and Values.

  • Vision: Building the Industry Cloud for Life Sciences
  • Values: Do the Right Thing, Customer Success, Employee Success, and Speed

Our goal is to be the most strategic technology partner to the life sciences industry. Our PBC structure and purpose helps ensure that we are aligned with the life sciences industry and will remain so into the future as we support the industry’s broad mission to improve health and extend life.

We also strongly believe in the multi-stakeholder approach. Throughout Veeva’s history, we have always taken customers, employees, partners, and our communities into account when making decisions. Indeed, we believe that to achieve meaningful success and maintain market leadership over longer periods, companies must balance the interests of key stakeholders.

Overall, we believe that pursuing our public benefit purpose and considering the interests of our key stakeholders enhances our relationships with customers, employees, job candidates, partners, and the communities where we operate in a way that makes our business more durable. In turn, shareholders stand to benefit when employees are engaged and happy, when partners can collaborate and add value, when customers are more productive, and when customers feel more comfortable partnering for the long term.

Our PBC Objectives

Our board of directors has established objectives in pursuit of our PBC purpose. Our objectives may change over time as our business and our relationship with the industries we serve evolves. For more details on our PBC objectives and progress, see our PBC Report.

  • Enable faster and less expensive clinical trials that are less burdensome and more accessible to patients
  • Support customer choice and remove competitive barriers from the life sciences industry
  • High-quality job creation—10,000 employees by 2025
  • Advocate for the elimination of the use of non-competes as a condition of employment in the U.S. by 2030

Reporting Against Our PBC Objectives

We report against our PBC obligations annually and publicly. We believe in transparency and the value of formalizing commitments by writing them down and communicating clearly. Our PBC Report explains how the PBC structure reflects our Vision and Values and how we are pursuing our public benefit purpose and multi-stakeholder obligations when we make important decisions.

Additional Resources

Vision: Building the Industry Cloud for Life Sciences
We focus on cloud technology, data, technical services, business consulting, and a network of partners to help the global life sciences industry become more efficient and effective. We aspire to become essential to and appreciated by the life sciences industry.

Values
  1. Do the Right Thing
  2. Customer Success
  3. Employee Success
  4. Speed

Our values are listed in priority order from one to four.

Do the Right Thing
We pride ourselves on being good humans that are honest, direct, and humble. We don’t lie, cheat or steal. We treat others how we wish to be treated and respect each individual person. We trust common sense over excessive rules. We consider customers, employees, the industries we serve, and shareholders in making decisions. Veeva is not all about the money.

Customer Success
Customer success has three parts. First, it’s about the people in the companies we serve. They should enjoy working with our products and people. They should be able to count on us and know we will go the extra mile when needed for customer success. Second, it’s about the companies. Our products and services should deliver positive value to our customers over the short and long term. And third, for the industries we serve. Veeva products and services should have a positive effect on the industry, making it more efficient, innovative, and effective. We strive to be an outstanding and highly strategic partner to the industry over the long term.

Employee Success
Veeva should be a place where employees can do their best work and work around great people in an environment of teamwork. Employees should be treated with respect and given the appropriate supporting structures to effectively ‘captain their own ship’ for growth and excellence. We are careful in who we hire, and we take action when things are not working out. We prefer to promote internally based on potential. We compensate fairly based on contribution.

Speed
We should try our best to do things quickly and correctly the first time. We should get the important things done today rather than tomorrow. As we grow, we must push decision making down to operating levels to retain our speed, agility, and innovation. We know that as a company grows it will tend to slow down. We fight against that gravity. We celebrate mistakes and learn from them. A company that has no mistakes has no speed, takes no risks, and has little reward.

Our current business operations and future growth depend on having a highly engaged workforce with a diverse set of skills and life experiences operating together with a common vision, values, and ways of working. To attract and retain our workforce, we offer competitive compensation and benefits. In addition, we take a holistic approach to our employees’ well-being and offer access to physical and mental health programs and resources so our employees can focus on their chosen wellness goals. But compensation and benefits are not everything. We have also adopted some unique practices that we believe differentiate Veeva.

  • Focus on Vision and Values. We are guided by a common vision—Building the Industry Cloud for Life Sciences—and set of core values: Do the Right Thing, Customer Success, Employee Success, and Speed. This statement of Vision and Values acts as our North Star for decision making and it is emphasized and engrained into our thinking. We begin every important meeting, including each meeting of our Board and all large employee meetings, by reviewing our Vision and Values. Our employees know and understand what we are trying to accomplish and the values that should guide how we get there.
  • Broad equity ownership. Many companies, as they mature, limit the issuance of company equity to an ever more narrow group of employees. We have done the opposite. In fiscal 2024, 92% of our employees were issued company equity. We believe this helps to create an ownership and team-first culture that motivates and rewards employees. We generally grant both restricted stock units (which have immediate value to employees at vesting) and stock options (which have value to employees only if we create value for our shareholders).
  • Work anywhere. We have also adopted a “Work Anywhere” policy, which generally gives employees the flexibility to work in an office or at home on any given day, with certain job-specific restrictions. Under our policy, employees can also relocate to a place that better suits their individual or family needs if they wish. We believe that our Work Anywhere policy broadens our talent pool by giving employees the freedom to live where it makes the most sense for them, including in places without an office nearby. We also take steps to ensure that all employees—whether remote, in-office, or hybrid—have the same opportunities for impact, contribution, and career advancement.
  • 1% Veeva Giving program. Our support for charitable causes is entirely employee driven because we think giving is personal and should be directed by the individual. With our 1% Veeva Giving program, each employee receives an amount equivalent to 1% of their base salary annually to direct to the non-profit(s) of his or her choice. There is no required employee match. Employees simply make a choice. We never dictate favored corporate causes or ask employees to donate to specific non-profits.
  • Career development. Our commitment to employee success means that we support employee growth and development. For example, we have a development program called Generation Veeva that is dedicated to building the careers of new university graduates in a supportive environment through onboarding, integrated project work, workshops, mentorship, and career path planning. This program offers new university graduates the opportunity to focus either in services, engineering, sales, consulting, or analytics.
  • Employee feedback and engagement. Managers at Veeva conduct a bi-annual check-in with each team member to foster trust and open communication. During these check-ins the manager and employee discuss the employee’s strengths, areas of growth, goals, and level of engagement.
  • No non-competes. Employee non-compete agreements are bad for employees, bad for innovation, and bad for the economy. We do not require any of our employees anywhere in the world to enter into non-compete agreements, and we have taken legal action to prevent the abusive use of non-compete agreements to restrict employees from working where they choose.
  • Executive compensation. Our most senior executives, including our CEO, all make the same base salary, which is set at a level that is modest by comparison to our peer group. Further, none of our most senior executives is eligible for a cash bonus or case-based variable compensation. Our executive compensation is, instead, largely equity driven and includes, as a significant component, stock options that vest over four years. We believe this structure fosters a team-first culture, encourages long-term thinking to create a sustainable and durable business, and aligns with the interest of shareholders and other stakeholders.
  • Fair termination and severance practices. We have lean teams and practice disciplined hiring. In 2023, we announced that we did not foresee layoffs in the next three years. When there is involuntary attrition, Veeva strives to be both fair and nimble with respect to the employee separation process. In the U.S., we provide a standard separation period with continued pay and benefits coverage that allows separated employees reasonable time to transition to a new employer with pay and continued health coverage. In Europe and Asia, we offer standard severance terms to ensure that all employees in the respective region are treated fairly and consistently.

Veeva’s core values guide our decision-making and define our culture. We recognize a responsibility to customers, employees, environment, and society. As a company, we strive to be a good corporate citizen, a positive force in the business community, active in our communities, and an example to others. Learn More

At Veeva, we don’t ask employees to sign non-compete agreements as a condition of employment and we will not let a current or past employer agreement prevent us from hiring a qualified candidate. We believe that non-competes are an unfair method of competition, restrain competition and depress wages, violate employee rights and limit their productivity, have real world consequences on individuals and competitors, are unnecessary to protect intellectual property, and narrow the job market. Learn More

Since 2022, we have maintained an International Organization for Standardization (“ISO”) 14001-certified Environmental Management System, which outlines our commitment to pollution reduction, energy and water efficiency, and waste reduction, tracking the effectiveness of our environmental sustainability program, and meeting or exceeding applicable environmental laws and regulations. The audit committee of our board of directors is responsible for oversight of our environmental management program. Our GHG emissions data can be found here. Our full Environmental Policy can be found here.


 
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